less helpful

The judges are pleased to bring you this blog’s second design contest. May you find this assignment, first and foremost, an opportunity for reflection and self-diagnosis at the end of 2007. The prizes and competition are secondary and incidental. They exist only to push forward the amateur designer who seems most inclined towards professional design.

Instructions

Design information in four ways to represent 2007 as you experienced it. This can mean:

four separate PowerPoint slides with one design apiece,

one JPEG with four designs gridded onto it,

an Excel spreadsheet inset with four charts,

etc.

Feel free to use pies, bars, dots, bubbles, sparklines, stacks, or designs of your own construction.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the contest was going to be based on yesterday’s post. Now the pressure is on—what if we had a boring year? Can we make stuff up? Can we claim celebrity status? Can we wait til you post then copy/paste? Is the winner from last contest exempt? This is very stressful.

What if I’m all ‘thinking about design’, but saddled with an inability to convert thought to creation?

Grrr….

Maybe, like Duffy Moon, I can close my eyes, puff my cheeks, and say, “You can do it, Duffy Moon” and then, like an after-school special, I’ll pull it all together and create something absolutely dazzling.

> What if I’m all ‘thinking about design’, but saddled with an inability to convert thought to creation?

Don’t do it to win – do it to do it. Ii suspect the problem isn’t whether you can do it at all, but whether you can do it well enough that you’d feel comfortable showing it to anyone else (much less the world). You’re not going to get to that point if you don’t take the first step.

So throw the data into excel. Have it draw a graph. Decide what you hate about the graph, and fix that. Already you’ll be ahead of 80% of the data presenters out there.

[…] Review Posted in January 13th, 2008 by Dave Stacey in Misc I’m happy to reveal my entry into Dan’s 2007 Review Design competition. It’s the result of a few days pondering, and more hours with photoshop than I would care to […]

[…] infographics which I’m pretty sure he stole from my math classes. His work inspired this blog’s annual report contest, which you’ll see again at the end of 2008. His annual report also inspired my classroom […]